Page 155 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

Snip.

The root severed cleanly in two, falling into the silver bowl with a soft, final click.

Chapter 28

AMAI

The back room of my jewelry shop was dead quiet, lit only by the glare of two laptop screens and the low hum of the air conditioner fighting off the Louisiana humidity.

For days, we had been chasing shadows along the coastline. Hector had already confirmed what Kaisen had done—he’d told us that Kaisen took Truth and Trumai onto a riverboat and slipped out into the deep water. But the Louisiana coast was a labyrinth of commercial channels, shipping canals, and forgotten industrial cuts. Knowing they were on a riverboat didn’t mean shit when a hundred different barges and vessels moved through the delta every single day.

I sat at the mahogany workbench, my hands resting on the cool wood. In front of me lay the custom ring I’d designed for Truth before the world blew apart.

The heavy steel security door clicked, and Priest walked in, carrying a manila folder with a fresh stack of printouts. His eyes were bloodshot, dark rings carved deep into his skin, but his posture was upright. Alert.

“Trey just broke through,” Priest said, tossing the folder onto the desk between us. “We got a hit.”

I didn’t lunge for the papers. I didn’t let my pulse spike. “Where?”

“Intracoastal City,” Priest said, pulling up a satellite map on the main laptop. “Small coastal port down in Vermilion Parish. Forty-eight hours ago, an urgent-care clinic logged an infant wellness check. Cash transaction. No state insurance.”

I looked down at the top page. Scanned paperwork with handwritten intake forms.

“That’s Kaisen’s paper trail,” I said, my teeth grinding together. “The name he used was an alias he used two years ago when he set up the dummy accounts to buy building supplies.”

“Right,” Priest said. “And we already had those renovation receipts we pulled—the high-end residential fixtures, the commercial soundproofing, the heavy diesel generators installed on a private commercial hull.”

Priest tapped three keys on the laptop, bringing up archived records from the Louisiana Gaming Control Board dating back six years.

“Look here,” Priest said. “A decommissioned three-deck casino riverboat out of Lake Charles. Sold at auction to a logistics LLC owned by Delacroix Holdings. The Freedom.”

I stared at the black-and-white registration photo on the screen.

It was a massive, three-hundred-foot paddlewheel casino boat, stripped of its gaming licenses, converted into a private mobile fortress. Not some luxury yacht that had to dock at fancy marinas where harbormasters checked manifests, but an industrial-sized ghost that could sit in deep commercial channels among working barges and look like scrap metal to anyone passing by.

“He bought this before the warehouse,” I murmured, the full scope of my brother’s insanity laying bare in front of me. “He was gutting and rebuilding a floating compound months before Rahsaan was even dead. Before Trumai was even born.”

“He planned the whole thing while sitting at your table,” Priest said quietly. “He didn’t just snap after the ultrasound, Amai. He was building this cage the entire time.”

The air in the room felt thick enough to choke on. For a month, I’d been chasing ghosts across three states, tearing up safe houses and beating low-level street runners until my knuckles cracked, wondering if Kaisen had taken them across the border or buried them in the woods.

Now the ghost had a name.

“Do we have a live transponder on her?” I asked.

“No,” Priest answered, shaking his head. “He’s got the commercial AIS transponder turned completely dark. She’s running unregistered in the back channels. But an old casino hull that size can’t navigate shallow bayous. She needs deep water—ten to twelve feet of draft minimum. Between the clinic visit in Intracoastal City and the fuel requirements for a vessel that heavy, she’s boxed in. She’s somewhere in the deep cuts between Vermilion Bay and Marsh Island.”

I looked at the map. Hundreds of miles of bayou had just shrunk down to a single parish.

“We don’t know the exact slip she’s tied off in tonight,” Priest said. “Not yet. But we know what we’re hunting.”

A strange, unnatural stillness settled over me.

For four weeks, I had been an animal. I hadn’t slept more than two hours at a stretch. I’d stopped shaving, stopped changing out of bloodstained shirts, and spent half my nights sitting on the hardwood floor of Trumai’s empty nursery, staring at an unmoving baby monitor until the sun came up. I had screamed at walls, broken furniture, and nearly beaten Winston to death in his own study.

All of that frantic, clawing panic vanished.

The heat died right out of my blood, replaced by a cold, heavy density that settled into my bones like iron.